by Harvey Lillywhite
I Pledge Allegiance to the Bottlecaps
Of the United State of Weeds
And to Our Perception
For which They Stand
One Nation
Under Awe
With Liberty and Justice
And Imagination
For All
Oh, wait, those aren’t the right words, they can’t be. . . .
O, so much has been written about the importance of fiction and poetry, merely to repeat or recombine these ideas would be a hash of little nutritional value and unquestionably untoothsome. Nevertheless, and even though words cracked and shattered for me when I was very young, the issue compels some answer, really! Really I’m just a kid playing in the weeds by the ditch by the side of the road a way off from the houses that must be there somewhere in the distance, fascinated by every little thing—always have been. Here, what’s this? A bottlecap? I’ll just pick it up and stick it in my pocket. I could collect them. Ah, to have a nice collection of bottlecaps won from the weeds.
All words for me cracked and shattered when I was very young. There was this first moment of self-awareness. I must have been around one. I walked early. I was picking up a toy near our house. It was just outside Bakersfield in Kern County, California. I have a picture of me with my brother and sister and our dog to prove it. My sense of vision then was not what it is today, not what it became as I grew older and went to school and learned to discern the important differences that keep us so neatly apart. In my memory of that moment of first self-awareness, I see a toy on the ground, wobble over to it, and pick it up. Then there is a voice, probably my mother’s, telling me that this toy isn’t mine and that I must put it down.
How odd, even then I thought, how very odd. This meant that there was a “me.” And that there was a “toy.” And there were suddenly rules that limited me, that created questions: How far does “I” extend? Where is the invisible person whose toy this is, and how can it be the toy of someone who isn’t there? And there were the ideas of property, and proper, and prosperity.
The light was blurry and bright, and I think at that age I was nearsighted because I can’t remember seeing anything in the distance, not the huge stands of cottonwoods and oaks, not the livestock that were always around. So I must have started to cry. The moisture in my eyes was making the light filmy and all-encompassing in a very familiar way that, to me now, suggests that I had been born from some house of light, from the light itself I want to say though I know how ridiculous that would sound.
This must have been when words started their cracking and shattering for me. I remember the feeling of separation in that moment—separation and isolation. I was somebody. I wasn’t everybody. I could see what was out there that was not me, which I must have thought was obviously me before then.
This little bottlecap isn’t what I’d expected to start writing about. But an awareness of words themselves as poetry and fiction, from a very, very early age is something that has defined the world to me. I’ve always loved words as they crack and shatter. My mother read endlessly to me when I was growing up, often in funny voices, and I love her for that.
Fiction and poetry, we are taught, exist to educate and inform us. See how reductive words can be? And how they manufacture little avatars that we mistake for thoughts and ideas. Consider the word truth. Now there’s a fiction. I understand the word comes from the same Indo-European root that means tree. Holy metaphor of our perception. TRUTH. Something with roots and limbs, something nearly permanent—at least with a longer life than we have. The Tree of Truth. More weeds and bottlecaps.
Among everything else that fascinated me when I was in school, I was particularly taken with the huge chart of the elements, the periodic table. This was an alphabet that had some clout—an alphabet anyone could believe in. And to think that all the things in the world, nay, in the universe, are made of these letters in some combination—our logos, the heavenly host of words, that, in the beginning, there were…lying in the weeds, the great surprise we endlessly are discovering.
Such certainty is cozy. It’s only right that we take such huge comfort in Science, which, as a word, comes, I think, from the Greek word for knowing. We like to know, to be able to predict. While science is surprising, it is strangely about taking the surprise out of living. Look how science has crept into our minds and our cultures—the social and behavioral sciences. I work in a university English department. And we are supposed to be doing “research,” of all things! We are supposed to be publishing our research in our learnéd journals. The study of literature has adopted this scientific model. I myself am a doctor of literary science?
No wonder I prefer the weeds by the ditch by the side of the road a way off from the houses that must be there somewhere in the distance, fascinated by every little thing, including fiction and poetry. After all, Poetry is the language of the heart. Poetry is the heart of the language. Language is the poetry of the heart. The heart is the language of poetry, and so on. Three cheers for Gertrude Stein, for Alice in Wonderland, for Boddhidharma, who brought Buddhism to China, w(is that what he did?)ho may not have existed, or may have existed in composite, many people rolled into a single personage? He sat in front of a wall and meditated for nine years. He cut off his eyelids so he would remain enlightened. Then he came out and taught the people, saying, “You already know everything you need to know.”
My favorite fiction from childhood has, unfortunately, been banned because it’s seen as politically incorrect. And this is a sad state of affairs. The story is Little Black Sambo. It has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with race or race relations. As I recall, it was a story of a little boy in India whose mother dressed him in the finest clothes and asked him to go to the store for some butter, which she wanted to put on their pancakes for breakfast. When he goes off into the jungle, he is met by a series of ferocious tigers; each one wants to eat him. But, in exchange for his life, he gives each tiger an article of his fine clothing and tells each tiger that he will now be the grandest tiger in the jungle. Finally, all of his clothes are gone, and there are several tigers wearing his clothes. But when the tigers meet, they all claim to be the grandest tiger in the jungle. The little boy, who has climbed a palm tree, watches as the tigers fight. They chase each other around and around the tree, bawling and clawing and tumbling after each other, until they all dissolve into a rich ring of butter, which little black Sambo gathers up and takes home to his mother. He then sits down and eats a huge stack of pancakes with his whole family.
The words sacred and silly are closely related. We are all trying to get at the truth, there in the weeds among the useless little rusted bottlecaps we ignore. And though black has always been my most favorite color, I’ve always loved orange and oranges and pumpkins and Halloween. Here in the weeds, I find red exceedingly wonderful. And I am amazed that such a color exists at all.
POETRY
In Chinese, the word poetry is made of two words
Word and temple
And temple is made of two words
Emptiness and God
And God is made of two words
Nothing and everything
And everything is made of two words
Pain and joy
Which are the same two words
That make the word living, though the order is reversed.
(Footnote One):
The word word is also made of two words —
The first has no equivalent in English
But designates the small blunt instrument
Used for killing huge bears in hand-to-hand fighting;
The other designates the thing killed,
Either the one wielding the blunt instrument or the bear.
In closing, I would like to mention my belief that fiction is how we colonize our minds. We come to believe in so many sanctioned stories. My oldest son believes in free markets. My youngest son believes in video games. My aunt believes in Jesus. My mom believed in getting along—not domination but partnership (see Different Visions of Love by Brian Griffith). My brother-in-law believes in wealth. My brother believes in sports. My sister believes in an afterlife. I believe in the weeds and in the bottlecaps. I believe in you, and I believe in me. And I believe fiction and poetry are always showing us a way out of our own little stories. See how they separate and unite us one and all.
Already, in the Future, I Am Dead
But for this moment—
when my alarm rings
Before the sun’s returned, stunned and half blind
I shower quickly, sit for a short time—
Accepting that what is is exactly
What should be—listen to a big cricket
Glad to be indoors, feel the chill Morning
Stars’ vision of what is soon to be here
As everywhere red leaves are falling, make some strong tea,
Read a tincture of poetry before
Gliding into ever-building traffic
Grinding toward this day’s successful fall,
Listen carefully to the sun arise
As all the little things that impede us
Fervently return—
it is beautiful.